Suzanna Jansen on Pauper Paradise: 'Poverty still leads to isolation'

The garish signs KEUKENHOF keep on whizzing past café Foolish Business, on a very sticky Tuesday morning. Hordes of tourists throng behind them, ready to spend money on picturesque pictures and unique experiences. My interest today is in the opposite, the desolate 19^the century colonies in Drenthe, then called 'Dutch Siberia'. To me, Drenthe is known as ' a cyclist's paradise' but writer Suzanna Jansen wrote the 2008 bestseller The Pauper's Paradise about, in which she meticulously traced her family's history back five generations.

She is wearing a summery blue dress and is in transit to the 'crime scene' of our conversation, Veenhuizen, to drive past her 'favourite places' with RTV Drenthe. This is a tad ironic, since she knows Drenthe mainly through her ancestors, who lived and died under miserable conditions in the colonies.

15 June 2016 goes there in Veenhuizen theatre show The Pauper's Paradise   premiered in the courtyard of the Gevangenis Museum, about 'one of the most dramatic hidden histories in the Netherlands'.

As many as 1 million Dutch Descend from Veenhuizen clients[hints]From the registers reveals that Ruud Lubbers, Geert Mak and Alexander Pechtold, Thea Beckmann, Anton Pieck and Bert Haanstra, among others, are related to paupers from the 19th-century poor colonies[/hints]. From 1823, when the asylum was built, thousands of Dutch paupers were sent to Veenhuizen for re-education. What once began as an idealistic project where families and orphans could voluntarily build a better life (read: spit) ended up as a brand for revolving-door paupers who, because of their stay at Veenhuizen, were never able to build an independent existence elsewhere.

Eight years ago, 'Pauper's Paradise' became a bestseller. How do you look back on the past few years?

'That so many people have bought and read it is unreal to me. What I wanted to make clear is that your origins are still a big factor in your possibilities in the future. We would rather not know that today. In fact, we prefer to think that anyone can become anything based on their abilities. That is not true. For example, I get many responses from people who were the first in their family to go to university due to increased prosperity in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite their good position, they have always continued to feel where they came from. And that has limited their options. They recognise their story in my book.

I never thought my book would become a bestseller, I find it very special that so many people read it and are touched by it. I still get weekly emails about it from people, after eight years, telling me how it touched them.'

Isn't it crazy to make money from a book about poverty?

'Absolutely. But everything is crazy about how it turned out. I spent four years of my life working on this book, by myself, in a basement with no daylight. I was afraid no one would read it.'

What are you passing on to the next generation now?

'I don't come from a poor family myself, but I did unintentionally get the 'doubles mentality' from my mother. I don't think my daughter will suffer from it. At least I hope so. I hope that by bringing this history to the surface, I have defused it. By the way, my daughter is not into this at all. She is 14 and dealing with things that are important to a 14-year-old. And so it should be.'

What touched me at the time about your book was how ' hard' we used to look at poverty. That we saw it as a destiny you couldn't tamper with.

'The book is also about today. We still tend to see people who are poor or need help as losers who have themselves to blame. You don't have to be uneducated/addicted/in debt/moving to Europe if you don't have a visa, do you? While bad luck can beset any person. And just like before, there is a huge gap between the policymakers who want to tackle poverty out of good intentions and the people it affects.

Of course, poverty often has a different face now. There are now benefits and social work. You practically always have a roof over your head and food in the Netherlands. But the shame of poverty and prejudice still cause social isolation.

Did you know that near me, here in Amsterdam, there is a soup kitchen for the homeless , run by Mother Theresa's nuns from Calcutta?'

Can't get enough of always being associated with The Pauper's Paradise?

'I have told the story before but it is never routine. I want to tell it because it remains important. Maybe I am like a missionary.'

What is your involvement in this theatre show?

'Many writers don't interfere when their work is made into a film or show. But for me, the very condition was: if I can work on it. Fortunately, I didn't even have to say so. Tom de Ket really wanted me to be part of it. We spent a couple of years really getting the performance off the ground. Artistically, but especially also in terms of business.

I have no problem letting go of my own text. On the contrary: I enjoy seeing what others create based on this story. Besides, it's a nice change from working on my next book.

The performance has three lines, some more explicit than in the book, but theatre is a very different form. You have image, colour, sound, movement, all elements you can't use in a book. But you can put a lot more information in words on paper, and you are not tied to a specific time. So we looked at what we thought was the essence of the story and built the scenes around that. Tom de Ket wrote the script, and together we devised the storyline.

It is emphatically not an adaptation of the book but based on it. Because I describe five generations in my book, we chose a couple, Cato Braxhoofden and Teunis Gijben, my great-great-great-grandparents, who met in Veenhuizen. Besides the tragic love story of the Protestant guards' daughter and the Catholic pauper's son, we show the founder of the colonies, Johannes van den Bosch, speaking. All his life, he fought hard for his ideals of providing a future for vagrants and outcasts from society but in practice, some of his ideas turned out disastrously. Those who ended up in his institutions were often unable to leave. 'Veenhuizen' was a stamp for life.

In reality, Teunis was the son of voluntarily arrived colonists. But because we felt it was also important to tell the story of the forced deportations of orphans, we rewrote him as an orphan from the Amsterdam orphanage. Those orphans were all deported from the Alms orphanage taken away, they often just still had relatives, parents even, in the city. But the colony needed people.'

Why do you call it a theatre show? It creates expectations.

'We are going to redeem those. We are playing at the place where the paupers of old actually walked around that asylum, now the courtyard of the Prison Museum. That setting alone has a huge impact. And that's just the entourage. We have a huge stage with a moving set by visual artist Michiel Voet, we have seven actors and a dancer, a band with music specially composed for the performance by the young talent Lavalu, a choir of thirty people who simultaneously choreograph to complement the set, and a rock-solid script. All these elements together tell the story. 'Spectacle just better covered the connotation of the overall experience it becomes.'

A gesamtkunstwerk, then? 

'Yes, it is.'